Well, it is obvious that the debian folks don´t care about anything
outside
their ivory tower. I meant filing a bug at the cdbs upstream that their
build scripts are broken cause being unable to build in parallel _is_ a
bug IMHO, so they would perhaps fix this.

Er, sry, I forgot what cdbs is, seems like you are screwed ;P

But more seriously, not doing the builds in parallel is just a waste
of time
and resources and debian& buntu builds already take much longer than rpm
builds (e.g. during package install) so disabling parallel builds to
please
some broken packages isn't an option imho. Simply wait till a way to
disable
them in the packages meta data is implemented and fix it in the
meantime by
adding "-j1" to your make call.

You didn't read the reply by the author well. The package is not broken,
it's a choice to have the package like it is. That's why it's not a
accident that it fails on obs and not on the Debian, Ubuntu and
Launchpad build systems. They doesn't violate the Debian policy and I
think that's a good choice. That's also why the cdbs author argues that
obs is broken, not the package and I do agree with him here.

It's fundamentally wrong imo to provide a service for Debian packages
and not accept the Debian way and the Debian policy. Of course you could
discuss the way of building with the Debian devs and try to convince
them (at least the cdbs author seems to be open for a rational
discussion). But at the end the best thing a service for Debian packages
can do, it to adapt to the Debian way. Then we as users are assured that
we don't need all kinds of hacks to get our Debian packages build.

~P

I read the Debian policy carefully and nothing there it seems
_prohibits_ parallel building.

Quote:

"parallel=n

This tag means that the package should be built using up to n
parallel processes if the package build system supports this.[25] If the
package build system does not support parallel builds, this string must
be ignored. If the package build system only supports a lower level of
concurrency than n, the package should be built using as many parallel
processes as the package build system supports. It is up to the package
maintainer to decide whether the package build times are long enough and
the package build system is robust enough to make supporting parallel
builds worthwhile."

So, reading that it seems then that in the case of OBS, it can provide a
robust build system to parallel builds. Therefore, perhaps it might be
worthwhile for Debian to reconsider what might be an out of date policy
- especially in light of the prevalence of multi-core CPUS.

Moreover, from my long time experience with OBS as a user/packager, the
statement that OBS is broken is fundamentally wrong. It is one of the
true gems of openSUSE. I'd sense more NIH syndrome :(

Peter

QUOTE:

"It is up to the package maintainer to decide whether the package build
times are long enough and the package build system is robust enough to
make supporting parallel builds worthwhile."

It's up to the package maintainer to decide, not to obs. That's the point.